4 Answers
4

The Ralph Waldo Emerson quote in your question riffs off the idiom to count one's spoons meaning, as others have noted, to check and make sure that
nothing has been stolen by suspicious guests. The phrase can be traced back
to James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791:

Edit (5/4/12): Note this passage has been turned up 23 years earlier in another Boswell book. See Hugo's link in the comment below.

My family adored Emerson. I have always taken the saying as meaning, since most families in the U.S. at the time, counted silver spoons as among their most valuable possessions (we have some, nearly transparent with wear),it means the louder one speaks of such as patriotism, the more doubtful we are about the speaker's sincerity as a patriot in the true sense. Very handy for casting doubt in a jocular fashion on reported remarks.